1

1 -

~,.-...

e a. ,

,

,""

, 1

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Tt~ is spatial ~ everything xis-ts in a "nunc st~s" and tlothing happens. But pei:her does space~exist nd th~re is no duality;

"Everything subj ecti ve !:?. obi eti ve 1 and every.thing obj ecti ve !:!. sUbjectiv. The world is thworld-of the unit y of oppsites"

" . .~ (Tert,ium Organum, 242). Whe~her or not Lowry seriously believed - .

31

aIl of Ouspenskys rnetoric, he was undoutedly impressed by many d

of Ospensky 5 Cl,aims. Th~. table of cohsciousness at the end of . .

Tertium Organum contains ideas, in particular the concept of leveIs , of consciousnesS." which would hve appealed to Lowry. ..... ""... " 1-

In A New Model of. the Uni verse. Ouspens~y further develops . --- --- . , h~~ theory of l~vel~-of consc~ousn~ss as the ~eans for mans spiritual e~oluJ:ion. TheFe 1s an important parallel between

~spnskys levels~of ~~nsciousness and the stages of drunkenness - r ~ ~ i .....

through which Ge9~frey passes on-his last ay. In describlng his

experiments in expaha~g ~onsciousnes~, ~uspen~ky pay~ particula~; . . ... "attention to a "second threshold". between the first levei of . heightened ~onsciousness and th~ third representing reality:

In the "transi tional state," which, as 1 learned very soon, was ntirely subj ecti ve, 1 usually began almost at once to hear "voces. Il These "voices" were a characteristic feature of the "transitional state. Il . ,f , The voices spoke to me and often said very ~trange things whih

seemed to have a quality of trick in them . Sometimes 1 heard music which evoked, in me very varied and powerful emotions.

~ .But strahiely enough 1 felt from the first ,day a distrust of these states. ,They contained too manY.pro~ises, too many things 1

~ wanted to have. (~New Model, 282-283) . .

It is while ~e is on ,Ouspenskys "second threshold"-not sufficiently t ~::. ..

?l b drunk - that :&eoffrey hears his "fami lirs. " His aim throughout .:., .. l

:

the day is to reach that stage of inebriation where vision and harmony

.~. will replace the tlde,monie orchestras" t~t tonnent him. Following ~ on from this "secon

\

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, , 32

the dimensions of time that he sets ~ut in.th~ title chapter of A New Model of the Uni'verse. - -- Time, lie explain~; ,is mul tidimensional ~ , nd a11 actualities exist on o~her tinte leveIs:,

In every moment and at every point of the three dimensional world there are a certain number of possibili ties; in "time," that is, in the fourth dimension, one possibility is actualized every moment, and these actu~lized possibi,lities are laid out, one beside another, in the fifth dimension. The line of time, repeated infinitely in eternity, leaves at every pbint unactualized possibilities. But these possibilities, which have not been actualized in one time, are actalized in the sixth dimension, which is an aggregate of

, . "aIl times." (~ New Model, 377)

If this ~ounds like a rigid, tightly closed system -to the extent

that it can be understood at all!- Ouspensky~ in terms reminiscent

of Yeats, is quick to point' out that there is a way out: "~e sixth

dimension is.the way out of the circle.~ The line of time becomes

a spiral" (A New Hodel, 377).

The 'purp~se of a11 these dimensions of time and consciousn~ss,

and the poi~t that influenced Lowry's conception of his protagonists, , \ is that~~an can evolve frorn one level to another by deve19ping his

own consciousness. With each repeated existence, man can'learn from , '

~, his'past and dirct his' energies towards the only true evolution-'t";" ,. ~

the evolution of consciousness.* Ouspensky's system is, finally"a d \

moral ode in which knowing and striving result in the upward spirals

through time of the good man. On the other hand, the bad man, the , '-criminal or drunkard who refrains from effort 'and refuses to learn,

eventually spira1s right out of existence.

arie further aspect of Ouspensky' s theory of time and spac,e

warrants attention. In an effort to outdo modern SCience, Ouspensky

~[EJVOlution means escaping from the wheel of the fifth dimension and passing into the spiral of the sixth dime11sion " A New Hode1,

, p. 425. There is a striking similarity between OuspenskYs theory and that expressed by Yeats in A Vision. Both were influenced by the popular theosophy of ~adame-Blavatsky and Annie Besant. This idea of the spirals a1so occurs in a somewhat unexpected place, Nordahl G~eig's The Ship Sails On (New York, 1927), where the narrator comments that "Life had p1ayed OM of hs scenes over again, a new spiral had wound its way upward " p. 167(' Lowry.combini,ng two remarks from ~ Ship Sails On, writes in Selected Letters, p. 264, "Anoth'r spiral has' wound i ts way upward. Reason stands still. What do we know?"

" '

H.

33

.laims that his "new model of the unJverse" explains the nature of

the unit y of Einstein's space-time: /

In old physics space is always space, and time is ~lways time. In the new physics the two categories rnake one, space-time. In the new model of~the universe the phenornena of one cate~ory can pass into the phenornena of the other category, and vice versa .

The six-pointed star which represented the ,world in ancient syrnbolism is in reality the representation of space-tirne or the "period qf dimensions," i. e. of the three space-dirnerisions_ and the three time-dimensions in their perfeet union, where every point of space includes the whole of time and every moment of time includes the whole of space; when everything is everywhere and always.

(~ ~ Model, 390 - 319)

How much of this Lowry understood is not important. The exciting

quality for Low!y of Ouspensky's theory is that it discovers the kind

of inte~connection and repetition in this world which Lowry loved:

Einstein's space-time equals" the six~point star of the ancient (1 ' "\

mysteries! Furthermore, it, provides Lowry with a rationale for

his belief that in any mment of time or in any specificiplace, one

can belin touch wi th other' times and places (especially :trom the! past); -- .

the human psyche is not bound by mechanical laws of three-dimensional

space and unilinear "time. How Lowry reconciled such "a view o,f an

already existent future with Bergson and Ortega who both beli~ve in an open future awaiting hurnan creation, is not clear. The'status

. of the future poses a problem in each of Lowry's novels and in the

Volcano these conflicting attitudes towards the future are dramatized

in Geoffrey and Hugh. h ~ ,

The five manuscript versions of Under the Vol cano housed in the

Special Collections of the University of British Columbia'represent - ( - "-

two distinct versions of the novel. In 1940 Lowry's first' version

was refused by thirteen different publishers. The reasons for 'this~

refusaI are not known, as aIl attempts to locate the readers' reports

have failed. One criticism of th~ early Volcano, however, has survived o_

In an unpublished letter to Lowry from hs agent Harold Matsbn (dated

October 7, 1940), sorne of Martha Foley's remarks are recorded:

, .',~

34

It is a very unusuai book but one that we feel does not quite emerge from under the burden of the author's preoccupation with what might be desc,ribed as the Dunn (:;-ic] theory of time. * '

During the late twenties and thirties J. W. Dunne 1 5 An Experiment

~ Time was in grest vo'gue. 20 Priestley was fascinated with Dunne's time theories and 50 was Malcolm LOl'l'I'y. Re'ferences to Dunne and the

law of series occur repeatedly in his le~~ers, and ~ Experirnent With

Time was the third book which, in 1940, he suggested that Mrs. - , Bonner read.

Dunne's book is an attempt to construct an pistemology based

on the the~~y that time is seriaI:

Now, we have seen that if Time passes or grows or accumplates or expends itself or does anything whatsoever exce~t stand rigid and changeless before a,Time-fixed observer, there must be another Time which times that activity of, or along, the first Time, and another Time which times that second Time, and 50 on in an apparent series' to in~inity. Oc>

(ExpeTiment, 133)

This time series gives rise to a universe of Chinese boxes, one

contained within the other 'd infinitum. Furtherrnore, the observer

of this seriaI universe is aIso seriaI. Far fr9m being a passive'

receptacle, Dunne's observer is capable of psychic penetration into

other time levels or, wha~ amounts ta the same thing, of txansforming \

himself from Observer A into Obse~er B and'so on.

The implications for ,such a ~erial identity are vast, for if 1

an individual can move from the smallest time level to a greater . \ ' encompassing one, then he can percei ve the past and the futt 'e of the

first observer as weIl as of other observers. In this way Dunne ,

believes that he has "scientifically" acco\'tted for the phenomenon of (,'

precognition in dreams and t1me travelo Not to be stopped~here, he

, a goes on to suggest that by b~ing able to penet~ate other tirne leveis and for~seeJ 50 to speak, the future, the observer can interfere in

thatl future. (How one can both foresee and change the future i5 a . mystery!) Even death itself is overcome, for when a persan dies he

1 *Martha Foley was ~ reader for Harcourt-Brace. In Selected Letters, p. 39, Lowry refers to this comment of o Foley's passed on to him by Matson: "1 think on rereading that Martha Poley's judgement is maybe r ,a just one in part; there is too much preoccupation wi th t ime, and the pattern does not \ emerge properly. ft

\ . \ 3S

simply ceases to exist on one time level and passes ~n to another. Dunne, then, like Ouspensky, postulates'an ultimately moral

universe ~n which m~ is free and capable of intervenfng to change the course of future events. The Dunne seri~universe, far from

b . bl k ... . h . k ' \ ~f elng a ea pesslmlst~c progresslon, ens rlnes tt1e ,ystery 0 t~e universe and the power of the individual mind wit~in a logical

but non-reductive order. Dunne also offers-a method fbr explaining o \

the problems of repetition and coincidence without dis~issing them

as meaningless; the seriaI observer in a seriaI univer~e is able to perceive intiicate connections and inter-relations betw~en people.

and events on v:arious time levels. For Lowry, \'lith his \need for an '

order which would exalt personal consciousness while sup orting an

organic view of the world, Dunne's serialism offered man answers.'

. '

In his notes for the film_script .of Tender is the Night 1 Lowry remarks'

that even though he is "not illustrating a Dunne-like the ry of time

. . we can gran t sorne such proces s as part of an accepted truth. If ,

\

In the spring of 1956,1 Lowry wrote from England

a Dollarton friend and neighbour, as king for "two magical b

the Q. .!!.!!... 0.). ~ Bride' s Reception and The Anatomy 2f the ~.21 Both books were written by a Vancouver Cabbalist an enumerator Charles Stansfeld-JOnes (Frater Achad) whom Lowr

met in 1941 when Jones called at the Dollarton cabin,.

encounter led to a'close friendship. In addition to studyin

own books, Lowry was able to-read widely in Jones'

and esot~-ric li ter~ture. According to Mrs. Lowry J she and Ma

also practisedthe! Ching witlL~Frater Achad. 22 There are

Burt,

of

however, in assessing jones~i influence on Lowry. Although connection

with, Jones undoubted1y intensified his cabbalistic interests i is as

weIl to remernber that Lowry had sorne acquaintance with the Cab la and

other 'ancient- myths through his relationship \vith Aiken years b fore.

As the early (pre-194l) manuscripts of Under the Volcano i lustrate,

the book was ready for a final infusion of Cabbalistic syrnbo~ and

correspo~dences (drawn i~ particular from Q~B.~.)when Lowry met Jones.

-----------------1-

1 !

, 1

Tree of Lire with Correspondences.

l

r ,~ ... t

.

".

This drawing of the Tree of Life is from the Appendix of Jones'

1

,>

Q.B.L. ~ The

. ""

36 , '

What ~oul~finarl~ have happened to the C~bbalistic references , sur~ounding the McCandless i~cto~er Ferry is speculative. _-.Lowry

had traced out the Tree of Life from the Q.B.L. on a partial'

draft of a let ter to David ,Markson dated February 5, 1954 and this'

fact, together \.,ri th the 1956 request for the two Jones books, indicates 1

his continuing concern with Jones' theories. * Instead of iempt~ng

to track down direct references to Cabbalism

is possible to view the Cabbala, particular

.in The Anatomy of the Body of God, as a gen

religious influence upon Lowry's already establ hed concerns.

The chief purpose of The Anatomy of ~ Body f God was to prove

and illustrate the constant movement of the Tree of Life which

represents,not only the entire universe but the microcosm of the

human soule According to Achad, the Tree of Life is

not a fixed design but capable of ~ndeflnite progression towards the Infinitely Small or the Infinitely Great. For it can be so drawn that it appears with aIl its details and'properties, repeating themselves indefinitely in every direction of Space to Infinity.

. (Anatomy, 12) t

With the aid of elaborate diagrams~ Achad goes on to explain the \

functioning of the Tree in three dimensions and the esoteric

consequences of its intricate duplication. For example, in its

perpetuaI proliferations part? of the Tree overlap and contain other

parts; this phenomenon leads Achad to the claim that the Abyss

within ~he Tree of Life is duplicated and hidden everYl"'here. If the

Tree were telescoped, Kether (the spiritual world) would coincide

with Malkuth (the material ~orld), thereby symbolizing the mystical

unity of the two. The doctrine that Heaven and Hell are the1same place

or that the way up is the way down, ideas that terrified and fascinated

*This tracing of the Tree of ~~fe 'appears to:be from the Q.B.L. J p. 43. lt is unfinished and with Lowry's habit of using and re-using available pieces of paper, it cannot be said exactly when he made the copy or evenlif it was neessarily part of the letter to ~frkson. The letter, postmarked May 10, 1954 and written in St. Paul's Hospital aft'er Lowry had lnjured himself, makes no reference to the Cabbala or re1ated subjects, though it is a delightful example of Lowry at his symbolic, extravagant best. Selected Letters, 366.

\

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37

Lowry, are basic to Achad's organic Tree . Some of Lowry' s most striking effects with time and space are

attributable to-the imaginative stimulus provided by Achad's Tree ~

of Life. The palimpsest quality that Lowry gives to the consciousness

of Geoffrey Firmin, ~fartin Trumbaugh, and Ethan Llewelyn parallels , ,

.the overlapping and containment of the Tree. Various events in time

become superimposeQ on one ano~her in the protagonist's mind. His

'thoughts travel up and dO\ffi a mental' l.adder wi th signs, obj ects,

streets, or places acquiring p~oliferating symbolic dimensions. Thus

the barranca becomes a multilevelled and living symbol of historical '" conquest as weIl as the ante-diluvian world, the Abyss, the link

between Geoffrey' s garden and the Farolito,and a gigantic jakes. To

the Cabbalist, language itseLf is magic, with the mystica,l power to

trnsform consciousness. This belief in the powe! of the word is

ftrndamental to Lowry, ':l'ho se art is his attempt to grow and evolve and

in evolving to reflect reality.

Similarities exist between Dunne's seriaI universe and Achad's

Tree of Life; both theories offer a vision of a multilevelle~; dynami,c.

yet ordered universe. Where they differ is' in a sense of purpose.

The paths of the Tree of Life lead to Gad and the goal of "the aclept "

is to reach the Godhead of visionary knowledge by passing,successfully

through the abyss within the sou1 as weIl as within the universe. To (

do thi5 requires a highly developed consc~ousness'. If Heaven and Hell

are the same place and both are within man, succss or failu~ depends'

on one t s abili ty to control knowletlge - on one' s state of mind. In

Dunnels universe there is no such intense purpose !JI' absolute risk

despite his attempt to introduce "a superlative general observer, the

fount of a11 . self-consciousness, intention, and intervention" towards

the end of his Experiment Wi th Time. .

Finally, it is high1y possible that Lowry acquired the title, M.

as weIl as philosophical support, for his literary continuum from"

Frater Achad 1 s QJhh. Through~t his book Achad emphasizes - in

keeping wi th the dynamic nature of his Tree - the flux and reflux of his . , ~ system, the neces5ity for accepting change, and the correct '~ethod of

Retum," embodied in the . constant motion of the Cabbalist 1 sTree of t"

g ,

J

, . 38

Life. He closes Q.B.L. with a final reiteration of his message in

the words which Lowry adapted to his own p;urpose:.

Thus, gentle readers, are we shown the Way to the Palace of , the. Bride.

" Set ye out upon that "Never-ending journey, each 'stEp of which. 's an unut'terable reward"

(Q. B L ., 106) !

~lthough Low;ry's knowl~dge

"

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/

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39

Pergson's Creative Evolution, pub1ished in 1911 and translated

in 1931, had a widespread influence'on twentieth century thought and

literature,."perhaps because it signalred a release of individual t

freedom and power from nineteenth century dete~inism. For Bergson; "to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to.

go on creating onese1f end1ess1y" (Creative Evolution, 7). Bergson ~,s

importance to a writer like Lowry who saw life, art, and the deve10pment " of consciousness as an endless voyage, 1s not difficu1t to appreciate . .

In Creative Evolution, Bergson attacks the "cinematographical , mechanism of thought" "which he finds in Western philosophy, religion,

and social structures: According to Bergson, this mode of thought

reflects a fear of contingency and becoming'. For oergsofi, who

believed that becoming is 1ife, creativity, freedom, and ultimately

the only reali ty, Platonic a~solutes and aU tradi tional _ concepts

of ontology represe~t stasi~ or death. The intellect, which is

responsible for the creati~n of static or timeless~concepts and

structures, is not equipped to.comprehend the "fan vital"; only

intuition can accomplish that .

In Bergson's conept of creative evo1ution the future is necessari1y

~known and unknowabl~i there can be no Dunne-1ike precognition because the futu).'e:awaits creation. The past, however, is of g~eat

- r

significance for evol!ltion, not the least for' the danger ~ t presen~s:,

In reality, the past 1s preserved by itself, automatically. In its entirety, probably, it follows us at everx instant; aIl that we have felt, thought and willed from.our earliest infncy i5 th~re, leaning over the present which ii about to join it, pr~ssing ~gainst the portaIs of ~onsciousness that would fain leave it outside.

(Creative Evolution, 5) \

The past is always with us providing our personal duration, but

it must not become a ruling-force in the. progression of life because

it represents the "already become"; it is no longer charge,p with , !

life. Accorqing to Bergson, it is a mistake for the individual to ~

become psychically trapped in his past and to be involved, thereby,

in recurrence_ or rep,ed tion ~ Nature or -the materfa:l world repeats, Qut human co~sciousness does note ~ We must learn to use the past in

9rder to will the future and to create ourselves.

o J

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40

,

'I}te last of the major ~nf1uences upon Lowry's thougbt, especiaHy

in his later work, and one which must have sy,nthesized many of his . . (

ideas, 'is that of the Spanish philosopher, Jos Ortega y Gas.set, ~hose

_-!~_._ books Lowr~. began reading iri 1950." Lowry. was par ... ticula;IY impressed t ------------- " ". i ~-by- Orteg~'~. lecture on G?ethe and ~is book, Towards !!.. Philosophy of 1 . ~ ,

History. In an important letter (.Turt?:.23, 1950) to his Dollarton

i 1 ,

;'

J

friend, Downie Kirk, Lowry described the ideas which ,intrigued him.

He l'las pleased wi th Ortega ',s 'theory tliat "man is a S'Ort of novelist

", of himself":

This probably recommends itselfto me partly because if{it is true, and man i5 a sort'of novelist of himself, 1 can see something philosophical]y valuable in attempting to set down what actually happens in a novelist' s mind when he conceives what he conceives to be the fanciful figure of a personage, etc., for this, the part that never gets' wri tten would be the true drama .",.,

. , (Selected Letters, 210)

The impor.rant point about Ortega's theory is that man is the novelist \

or the makerof his own history and that this history is constantly

in the making: ,

Existence means, for each of us, the prdcefos of ~ealizing, under ,given conditions, the aspiration l'le are.

",

Body and soul are things; but 1 am a drama, if anything, ~ unending struggle to be what 1 have to be.~ The aspiration or program 1 am, impresses its particular profile on the world abqut me, and that world reacts to this impress, accepting or resisting it. 24

o ,

- 1 One of the chief obstacles to the, creation of history is, according

to Ortega, theo Eleatic nature of Western philosophy and religion., . " \, Ortega, in terms reminiscent of Bergson, sees. Western man's fear of . . ~ the contingent as a crippling restriction in his s~~rch for reali~y, Befor'e \we can know what we ~re, "we must first elaborate a non-Eleatic

, oncept of being, as others have elaborated a non-Euclidean geometry.

, "The "time has come for the seed sown by Heraclitus to bring for th its

mighty harvest"" (History, 203). Ortega 'criticizes Be;gson' s term

. "se faisant" for implying a passive qua lit y in the agent, almost as

if man l'las being made. He goS on ta emphasize his view that man )

, \ "

" "

o ,

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o 41

acti~ely creates, not only himself, but aIl human history. ,

The past, for Ortega, is always present in us: it 1s our right and

i t is good. He praises England in "the most glowIlg terms for prserving

sacred traditions. In wha;t odelighted Lowry as "one of the most

C"onv.incing arguments

Ort~ga dec~ares that . ~ ..-. .

against connnunismi , (Select-ed Letters, 212), o

t'o repeat, efface, br othe~ise misuse the :

p""st is i~ sin. ' The idea of spiritual or psychical recurrence is

anathema: \

[M]an, thanks to his power of memory accuml tes his_'past; he posses~es it and can make use of it. t-fan is nevE\r the first man but begins his life on a certain lev~l of ac umulated past .... the important part of this treasure (the. pastJ i ... the memory of mistakes, allOl'ling us not to repeat the same ones forever .. Breiking the continuity with the past, wantin 'to begin again, is a lowering of man and a plagiarism of the ora gutan.

(His or , 81)

Despi te O,rtega' s strictures on recurrence or repeti tlon wi thin

human,history,\Lo~y reconciles Ortega's philo phy of history and

~elf-creation with Ouspensky's adaptations of r~currence from

Nietzsche and Eastern Mysticism. When Lowry usek recurrence or

repetition of the past, however, it is eithcrto signify the

breakdown of: an indiv'idual's' will or to s~gge t' the necessity for ~de;standing and usinf the past i~ order to create the future - to crea~e oneself. For Lowry, beginning again does not invgJve a break

in continuity with the past but a further exploration of the pasto

' ...

p

. ,

o U~ing Lowry' s own remarks as a. pivotaI point it is n?w possible

()

to summarize the salient features of his- philosophy. One of -the

mosl'important of Lowry's manuscripts~ one which clearly illustr~tes. o~ his concems, is, the manu~cript of his short story "~hostkeper."

Interspersed with parts of the story are sorne of.Lowry's observations ~ .

on life:

Lire is indeed a sort of delirium perhaps that; should be contemplated however by a sob~r "healthy" mind. By sober and healthy 1 mean of necessity 1 imited.. The mind is not equipped to look at the truth.

, . .....

\

1) " "

'.

" JZJ ()

4 :. 42

(). .'-:" ' . " ,~ :

, '". 1 \

Peraps. people get inklings of that truth on the lowest plan when 'they d~ink tao much or go crazy and become delirious but it can't . be stomached, certaiply not from that sort of upside-dowt;l and , reversed~osition. Not thatOthe truth is 'bad' or 'good':, it simRly i5, is incoJ11prehensible, and though one is part of it: there is .

too"mucQ of it'to gr~gp af' once, or it is ungraspable, being perpetually Protean. ,

-.. ~, Without forcing, a systematic metaphysics on a nlost unsystematic .. ~ :

thinker, ,one can,l,in view of p reading and his oWlf remarks, a'cq1fire l '"",.." ,. - ':1

a reasonable picture of dIe Lowryean world . 'The. single most important ... "'0 < .. -\~ t 'l cP

aspect ef this world is its dy:namlsm:. Fqt Lowry, the 'uni verse was -

- in' a c~nstant p}ocess of change. Hj"s af:6inity for a world view~ v " ~, ~ :.; ~ - \ "". Q

"~

based upon a beHef i~perpe~u~l' move~,en't an"d possibility led-him

tO.Q-philosophers like S rgson, .Ortega; and Dunne, or mys.tics like

Stan~ld-Jope5'. ~Even '~pengJer, ofo lesser importance to Lowry~

. ~ ,

,

~l~ \;~

\\,\-

. ,

. '

. 'saw "world history as \~ picture ~f endless formations and transformations, J:J u ~... 26Tl",f,f\.''L~''''I''-'''lCl!:,'::'~'''f'"lY ..

, .

~f the marvellous waxing and~aning of organic forms." , Cyc~es an"a .... "~

, , recur1rences which: play suah" important'~Ymbolic and struc,tura~_ raIes' ~~ in.Lowry's fiction are subsidiary aspects< of r~aiity, the wheels '"'- "'3

e

~J within wheels"of an ultimately uneriding voyage.

At this point, however, a difficulty arises. In addition ta o ,'> ..

~ his beHef in a Heraclitean w'orld, Lowry '''las aiso attra,cted by

Ouspens~yts view,th~t time and space,ar~, in a sense, fixed o~ given ,

once and for aIl; nothing new can be said to come into being, , , "

according to Ouspensky, for the future has already been created. ,0

The central dilemma in Lowry's fiction is,the strugg~e ta use'the l " l

past to create the "future. ~ven if one accepts Lowry' s thesis that

this strug~le is a voyage that never ends, the reality, i~ Lowry's

fiction, of an open fui~re"which the individual can create i5 at "-

o _

b~5t uncertain; glimpses of such a progression exist th The Forest

Path and October Ferry.' Was Lowlo/ unaware f the contr-adiction in -. , his beliefs as they pertain to the future 1 or, more fikely,. was he , . at~empting t articulate this paradox in h~s fictIon? Perhaps Douglas

Day' 5 theory that Lowry was.GOrally fixated in an "infantile state - in

otfier words', in'! his Owfl pas~ - explains 'why he had 5uch difficul ty ,

~ving into a Be~gsonian future where' "ta ~a,ture is to go on creating

onese1f endlessly:'" In an~ case, this .col)tradiction in liowry',s attitude towards the future is never resolved; The best that"can be said

i5 th$t LQwry's characters behave fatalistically (as jf the future

o

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j

,"

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when they are

i~ ?alance4, they

ever-evolvLng univarse.

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confused by'hellish' despair; when

appear to live in harmony with an

43 .. (.

'-

, .,," "

The second outstanding j"eature of ~owry~~ world is its signification.

Nothing an be explained away as mere accident; everything connects ~ 0

or corresponds t form ,~_ highly significant whoIe. Lowry"givs .1

, creative form to his se~6e ,of temp~ral 'and spatial interconnection

o~"t,hE~ugh the 'use of Journeys and the more obvious metaphors of paths ladders)",,,,heels, as 'well as through fresh and ntriging syrnbols

, "', -', ~ like that of'tb~anam~r.anal. No matter how he accounts for it. , ",.7'., ..> each of the authors~ k ider~d !n this chaptr agrees that the univer$e . ' is fuH of meaning. .. ~ the strange bpoks of Charles Fort" whose

" ....... 1

.data on fires was used in Octobe~Jierftr-J&wry discovered a fascina,tlng

collection of 'fac,t,s' to prove that ~u'r wo;ld hont~s signs and events which log)c c'~nnot" expIain. His reading in' Bo~hm-e---..andSwedenborg I:eiy\fQrced his 'desire to Jntrpret tHe nat~ral w:;ld~~_ ~ ':'

1>. ,,~

As erly asJs-!-8" wl}en he responded-'so ,profoundly to Aiken:s ,,~ ""....... " , ''Housa,.of Dust" a~d Blue"'Voyage, -Lowry's concernCwith inaividual

',," " - . 'consciousness and perception was obvious: Lik~ the syrnbolistsilhe

. was un~i~1ing to allo~ mechnistic limitations~to the human psyche: '0 and hi~session wi t~ the creative' "a?d intui tiolla1 p~er' ~f the ,

~ - ~ .... '" " ----" ~ ~~~mind is a syrnptom of early twentieth entury romanticism.~ The key ~ ..., t } '"

'point is that', for Lbwry, the developme'nt of consciousllfss was in

""'prin,~ipl.neve~ complete; his "voyage tnat ~e,Ver ends" fs, on one leveI, " l " ,

the never.ending effort of the individual to develop consciousness

and thereby achieve understanding of a ~ysterious unive~se. It is , " '

Lowry'sobelie.f in the power of the psyche that made Jung's theories J' i'r\~

.o~ synch!onicity and,thp unco~scio4S congenial. '~

The' fusion of oppos~~es (drawn in-particular from ~sI'ensky and ,'- . . . ,

Jon~s) was a favourit~ rdea of Lowry's nd relates his concept of ~ ,,1 ..

consciousness to his picture of a Many levelJed, intricately connected . , . world. ~ Just as there are many l~vels of reality ex~ernal t man, the

. .. ~ , ' i t 1 hurnan psyche is ;~rrespondingly complex:, Lowry be~ieve~'~ co~ld ~

pen~t~a~~ deeper and deeper into th~ mystery'of rea~i~y by m;ans of , an V,~:--exp@dint consciousness. ~f m~ wer~ lo miS~S~. his pb~~rs. or :' '~, ~ease to evolve, a potntially pa~adisial existence ~OUld .quick~y"' ,:," become infernal; Lowry saw life in 'snch abSo:ute ext emes. "Thus .t~e

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peripheral ones,"" ~\ . Various claims Qve be~n ~ade for the influence or other writers

. 28 on L~wryt s technique. In his review of Under, the Volcano, Jacques'

BarZu'n,ac'cused Lowry of imitating Jo~ce, p~s Passos, and S~erne 50"

tnat the novel becomes "'an artthology held together bYe earnestness'." ... g s

1owry, 'deeply _affronted, wrote to Barzun (May, 1947) def~nding bis c'

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art,and his letter is worth examining. Barzun, he maintains, has

been grossly unfair:

45

For while few moodern wri ters, myself included, can have al'together _.escaped the influence, direct or indirect, of Joyce and Hemingway,

the "materials" Lof volcano] in the sense you convef are noit to b~ .found in either of these books [plysses and The ~ ~ RisesJ ~ A young writer will naturally try to benefit and make use 0 what he has read, as a -result of which, especia11y in technique, what -Van Gogh l think caUs "design-gove,rning postures" are from time to time inevitable. But where r found another writer in the machinery

'~ .... r always did my utmost to sweat him out.

f

. (Selected Letters, 143)

Lowry went on to declare that he had never read Ulysses through and

had only read one page of Tr~stram ~handy. The infl~ences upon

Un der the Volcano are "other, and for the most part also, l genuinely

believe,i absorbed . "

'1'h tr9cking down of stylistic influences upon a writer is an invidious task; of course, Lowry was aware of popular techniques.

Tp so~e extent this awareness came through Conrad Aiken, the one

writer w~om Lowry claimed as the major influence on his art. At >

the same time, and perhaps to a greater xtent, Lowry was influenced

by lesser wri ters ,th an Joyce, Faulkner J, or Dos Passos. In his - .

unpublished letter to Albert Erskine referred to above (p.~~),

Lowry mentions several ~inor works which influenced,his masterpiece. , . For example, Ralph Bates' The fields of Paradise suggested the , --Spanish-English dialogue and the use of the important ~ord "Campanero,"

and Houghton' s Julian Grant Loses His Way is an ~~i:remely heavy-< ,

handed portrayal of a dead~man in l\lell who relb(~s his past; here, ,

Lowry transformed his source. In one sense, the influence of these

writers' is less exciting than Joycean paral,lels. On the other hand,

t,hese authors l'lere undoubtedly more lmportant to Lowry and this

indicates the stature of his individual technical achievement.

The only major writers that a critic is fully entit~ed. to press ~ -

as influences on Lowry's technique_ar~ Conra~ Aiken and Henry James.

Lowry adoptd s~veral of Aiken" 5 'techniques -unsent let-ters, con-

trapuntal use of dialogue and thought, dreams, and travel in boats f -

or trains)in orde~t contrast'movement through space into the future

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with lhe mental voyage of the protagonist into the pasto From both 1 .'

Aikenland James, Lowry'leatned that the most fascinating material ~

for f~ction is the d~m'of consciousness. Following James' example, 1

he us~s an indirect narrator to mediate between the reader anl the .,

fiCtipnal expe~ience'-in, the Volcano, at least - with brillmt succ~ss. Final~y, from\Jarn~s' novels and prefaces, Lowry gained the respect

for fbrm whic~ characterizes his own work and raises it above Aiken's

~~. 4 1 rt is as we,l1 to remember , ... hen considering ,Lowry' s pO,etics that

he deeply admired Melville and, never rejected the narrativf't~aditions 1

of th~ nineteenth century. In a reminiscence of Lowry, Gerald Noxon, 1

a Cam?ridge friend and edi tor of Experiment, rev~als Lowry' s aesthetic

~ concems:

Basically Halcolm was unwilling to repudiate the legacy which he had found awaiting him in the works of nineteenth century novelists. While discarding the aridity of a purely realistic style, he was unwilling to adopt the kind of personal stenography which made the works of writers like Joyce and Faulkner superficially difficult for the reader but still insisting that his writing must be capable of carrying meaning at many different levels of intellectual and 29 emotxonal communication which he discerned in ~felville, for instance.

Lowry's manuscripts and notes offer considerab~e insight into

the way he wrote and his writing me~hods reflect, in turn, the core

of hfs aesthetie beliefs. Very rarely did Lowry eut material from

his ~anuscripts without'incorporating it, in another fQrm, at sorne l , '

other place in the texte In this way, his_w9rk always grew or

expafded; his primary conce~_was ,to get' as much into a book as

pOS~ble.- The extant-n6fs for J each of his books indicate that he, beg with a central episode for the books as well~as for each

L..----chap er and then built upon this fOUQdation by adding blocks of . desc iptive and thematic mater~al at either end. Frequently, he-

woul ~hift the positi~n of whole passages; in, Under the Volcano, for xample, paragraphs that had first been piaced in one chapter

were/later moved into other chapters. .

Lpwry ~ever seemed'satisfie~ with the symb6lic resonanc~ or, to k~ep the archi~ecturai analogy, with the churrigueresque facaie , of his work; his imagination continually discovered new connections , . and ~explored resemblances between words, images, and events. Syrnbols,

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allusions, motifs, are constantly being inserted- almost like

mortar - at, strategi

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building must never become stati~ but must continuously grow in time.

Malcolm Lowry,believed that stasis would destroy not only the work

of art but tre artist as weIl. In his "Working Notes" for October

Ferry ~ Gabrio\a, Lowry tackles the problem of time and space, motion and stasis in art from a different angle. Quoting Herbert

Read, he goes on to apply Read's theories to his beloved pier.* ,

According to Read, in the WOI'k of art the artist "has arrested the

flux of existence and made a solid and stable object: out of time - q

he has c.reat~d space." Unhappy with ,this theory, ~owry comments

that his pier is both "geometrical and organic"; al though it i5 1) F J.

solid and stable in one sense, it is full of motion and vitality

in another. He caUs his pier "a magic work of reason" that by the "

moon' s reflections is "Iike? amplification of the paths and

sephiroths of the QBL itself"Gi

49

possibilities, ideas, even resolutions - in ~ state of perpetuaI ~ metamorphosis. *

In Lowry's terrns, the realistic work of art is the one that most

nearly captures the flow and vitality of metaphysical and natural

reality - the withdrawal and retum of the universe and of the

tides. \;".

Parallelling his phi1osop~ical views; Malcolm Lowry' 5 aesthetic

is founded upon a bel\ef in the infini!e variation and movement of

life. Time is not a simple single-dimensioned line ~f cause qnd

effect nor space an empty receptacle to be filled as time marches

on. Just as his universe is an~intricately connected, supremely

meaningful structure, 50 his fiction is a multilevelled world in

which time and space are, ideal~y) unlimited. By penetrating the '>l> future or reliving

p

the past, by interpreting coincidences and events

as 'signs and portents, by travelling \mentally and physically, the Lowry

protagonist inhabits and becomes a dynamic, mysterious universe.

Finding watches, crossing borders under the watchful eye~ of customs

officiaIs, riding in buses, ferries, boats and planes, looping the . loop, visi ting the ruins' of Pompeii, even contemplating the stacks

of polished glasses in a bar, beco~e, under th~: spell of Lowry's artistic vision, aspects of a mystical journey, a glimpse into a

new world, the capturin~ of reality.\ The only forrn which: Lowry felt could p05sibly contain his vision

,/ was that of the voyage ever-renewed. If we move in ircles-or repeat

our pasts it is only within the larger journey which.we never complete. o

The purpose for this -constant movement is the evolution of consciousness

and the creation of life. The world for Lowry was ultimately a

reiigious and a moral one. Hell he identified with stasis and the

crippling of con~ciou5ness; Paradise - Eridanus -is the uninterrupted

voyaging and development of the soul. ,

*This is an invaluable passage for anyone interested" in Lowry and it has been surprisingly overlooked. An important part of the "Ghostkeeper" manuscript (one of the"short stories 'intended 'for ~ !!.:!./~ Lord) appears in Appendix E of Perle Epstein' s The Private Labydnth of r.1aIcolm towry. The emphasis i5 mine. These remarks explain what Lowrymeant when, in 1953, he wrote that he was looking for "a new form, a new approach to reality itselfll (Selected "Letters ,330).

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NOTES: CHAPT ER II

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1 ."Time in Faulkner' s The Sound and ~ Fury," William Faulkner: Two Decades of Criticism, eds. Frederick J .. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery (Michig~ 1954), p. 180.

2 Professor New' s article, "Lowry' s Reading," in Malcolm Lowry: The Man and his Wotk, ed. George Woodcock (Vancouver, 1971), although necessarily brief, is the best general study to date of Lowry's thought. New emphasizes the eclectic nature of Lowry's reading and avoids the distortion which arises in studies that concentrate upon one specifie influence. Perle Epstein's The Private\ Labyrinth (New Yo~k, 1969), while providing va1uab1e information on Lowry's Cabbalistic reading, overemphasizes the importance of the Cabbala in an understanding of Under the Vo1cano. The P"te-1941 manuscyipt versions of the Vol cano show that Lowry had alreqdy decided upon many of the symbols which are also important to the Cabbala. ,Two theses which discuss aspects of Lowry's reading and the subsequent influences on his fiction are Keith Harrison, "Under the Volcano and October Ferry to Gabriola: The Wight of the Past~PH.D. McGill, 1972 and R.H. Ramsey, "The Impact of Time and Memory on Malcolm Lowry's Fiction," M.A. British Columbia, 1970. Harrison concentrates upon the influence of Eastern mysticism, in particular Ve~anta and the ! Ching as we~l ,as offering valuable insights into Lowry's use of

.Greek myths. Ramsey's more 1imited study deals with Lowry's reading in Dunne and Ortega.

3 Accordlng .to his Vancouver lawyer 'andu persona1 friend William McConnell, Lowry "had that -rare (and rather frightening) gift of near total recall." "Recollections of Malcolm Lowry, If The Man and

"his Work, p. 155. It is doubtful ~hat any Lpwry bib1iography can be exhaSt:fve and one is continual1y haunted by the fact, that certain books or authors are inevitably overlooked. Section II of my bibliography is an attempt to suggest the scope of Lowry's reading. My selection corresponds in ~ost respects with,T6hy Ki1ga1lin's list of one hundred authors to have influenced Lowry. See Lowry, Appendix B. 4, " , "Swinging the Paradise Street Blues: Malcolm Lowry in England," Paris Review, XXXVII(1966), p.IS.

o t.

5 Ibid., p. 14.

6 In addition to the above mentioned studies (no. 3), the work of Richard Hauer Costa, Tony Kilgallin, and Douglas Day has provided

. invaluable assistance. Tony Kilgallin has privately corroborated my belief that Ouspensky,. Dunne, and Bergson are more important to an understanding of Lowry .than other writers such as Swedenborg or Boehme, and Day's biography of Lowry, while not discussing Lowry's reading in any detail clarifies the nature,of Lowry's metaphysical search. .

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7 "Malcolm Lowry: A Note," The Man and his Work, pp. 101-102. For Lowry's response to Aiken, See sctd LttrS; pp. 3-10 and pp. 270-279 where he writes that Aiken' s "work first slammed down v"tm my raw psyche 1ike the lightening sl~mrning down on the slew outside at this morne))t "

8 Day gives a good account of the years when Aiken.served "in loco parentis" for Lowry, offering rnany hi therto unknown facts about the Lowry-Aiken syrnbiosis.

9 See Costa's articlE;ls, "Lowry/Aiken Symbiosis," Nation, June 26, 1967, and "U1ysses, Lowry's Volcano and the"Voyage Between: Study of an Unacknow1edged Li tera!y Kinshlp ~" Uni versi ty of Toronto Ouarterly (Ju1y, 1967). According to the Aiken scho1ar, Professor Jay Martin, Joyce was not an important influence on Aiken. Conrad Aiken: A Life of his Art (Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 94. ~---

10 Qu d M 76 ote ln artln, p. 11 The Jig' of Fors lin : A SymEhony (Boston, 1916), 8. p. . -: 12 Martin, p. 139.

13 Preludes (New York, 1966), p . vi.

14 Collected Poerns (New York, 1953), p. 869.

lS The Short Stories of Conrad Aiken (New York, 1950) and Three' Nov$ by Conrad Aiken(London, 1965). Further references to these-books are included in the texte

16 M 26 artln, p. Il, .. c.

17 The' .!. Ching ~r Book of Changes, vo 1. 1 .(New York, 1950), p. i v. 18 1 am grateful to a 1etter from Professor Jay Martin for this infor-mation on Bergson.

19 A New Model of the Universe (New York, 1971) and Tertiurn Organurn: A Ky, fo the EnIginas-of the World (New York, 1970). AU further references are inc1uded in the texte

20 An EXEerirnent With Time (London, 1969). First published in 1927~ AlI subsequent references are inc1uded in the texte

,

21 Selected Letters, p. 387. Q.B.IL\, ~ The Bride's Reception (Chicago, 1972) and The Anatomy of the Body 2f ~_ (Chicago, 1925) are two treatises on the Cabbala by the VancoVer Cabbalist Charles Robert

'Stansfeld-Jones -"Frater Acharl." Further references 'and quotations , are included in the texte For a discussion of Lowry's friendship with Jones, see William New's article "Lowry, The Cabbala and Charles Jones," in Articu1ating West (Toron~o, 1972), pp. 190-195.0

52

22 ' , C., , 1 am grateful to a letter from Mrs. Lowty for thi~ infonnation.

The books in Achad's 1ib~ary ta which Lowry' had access are 1istea in Epstein's ~ Private Labyrinth and Ki1gallin's Lowry; each is a selected list and they' do not coincide. Both lists include such works as the .! Ching, the EgyPtian rJook of the Dead and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. ------23 Professor Martin confirmed the sp~Cial importance of Bergson to ~ Aiken in a letter to me~but one should aiso consult his book Conrad Aiken for a detailed analysis of Aiken's themes. The mo~t important of Bergson's books for Aiken and Lowry is Creative Evolution, trans; Arthur ~titchell (New York, 1931). AlI quotations are from this edition and are included in the texte

24 Jose Ortega y Gasset, Towards ~ PhUosophy of History (New York, 1941), p. 113. AlI further references are included in the texte Ortega's essay on Goethe, "In Search of Goethe from Within," is

, included in The Dehumanization of ~ (Princeton, 1968).

25 This passage cornes from the selections made by Epstein for Appendix E of ~ Private Labyrinth.

26 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, vol. l (London, 1926),' p. 22. Spengler als0!5ees space-as static and time alone as ~itally dynamic. ~

27 Although it is impossible ta say exa~tlY what of Boehme's works Lowry read and when, Boehme's reading of the Samari~an parable bears upon Lowry's use of it in Under the Volcano. Boehme wr,ites that ''This is a lively and manifest Representation of the Corruption of Man. in Paradise, and also of the Corruption of the Earth' in the Curse of God, when Paradi se depart~d from i t Now wilt thou be a Magus? Then thou must become ~he Samaritan, otherwise thou canst not heal the wounded and decayed; for the Body which thou must heal is half deal, and '\bre ly wounded . " "Signature of aIl things," The Works of Jacob Boehme, -vol. IV(London, 1781), p . 43. --

28 See Costa"'s "Ulysses, Lowry's Volcano, and the Voyage Between." Epstein rnaintains that the stylistic influence of Joyce on Lowry "is a critical commonplace," The Private Labyrinth, p. 4. Stephen Spriel caUs the Volcano "le texte prousto-faulknerio-dbs-passosio-joycien." "Le cryptogranune Lowry," Les lettres nouvelles. 5 (July-August, 1960), p. 69. . ,---

29 "Malcolm Lowry; 1930~" Prairie Schooner, 37, 4(Winter, :1963-64). p. 318. For Lowry's description ofthe importance of Melville, see Se1ected Letters, p. 197. While never knowing ~felvil1e's fiction particularly weIl, Lowry was deeply moved by the failure of Me1ville's life.

3~ Dark as the Grave lVher~in ~ Friend is Laid (New York, 1969), p. 154. -rI1 further references are included in the texte

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S3 i'

/ CHAPT ER III

Outwa,rd Bound

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The natur~ and the form of Lowry's metaphysical and experiential

quest begins to appear in his early writings. 1 Even in his first

stories Lowry discovered that finding is making - the quest is the 1

onstant making and re-making of self and 'reality. The characteristic

Lowry method for the fabrcation of self and world~is already present

in this early work as a process of encircling and containing experience f ... F.... .. Through constant travelling, through the images of ships, harbours,

1 engine rooms and wheels, external reality is possessed. To put it

another way, the self expa~ds in the effort to surround experience.

Space and time are internalized in the constant activty of life.

The poetic act itself~becomes an imaginative analogue for the

encircling of time and space and Lowry, in Ultramarine, if not

before, is clearly aware of the structural potential of his art.

Lowryls aim, sa wonderfully achieve? in Under the Volcano and Hear

~ 0 Lord, is to surround time and space, to enfold it verbally,

and through his art to make the reader repeat the process. Indeed,

the full thrust of the cirular structure in his best work is ,towal\~

the continuaI repetition, through the reader, of the encircling

process; for it is just that- a process, an activity, a sacfed ritual , ~

.'

~~ - - -- --- - - -- ---- -- ------ ~ ---- -- - ---~-~-

*The phrase "outward bound" is ,one' of Lowry' s nucleii of meaning. tt refers to a ship's voyage from port and, as such, syrnbolizes the voyage of the soul or consciousness of the individual through life. The ,phr~se pl~ys an important role in Ultramarine where it defines the

l' na - 15 uest. It oc.curs al 50 in, October Ferry where, as in the unpublished story on Vanels play Outward Bound (New 'York" 192~). In the play, aIl the characters on the boat are dad and outward'bound for hell- or heaven: "It's the same place. you see." With this point in rnind, Dana's voyage becomes profoundly ambiguous." He could be outward bound for heaven or heU - aIl ,depends on...,his perception. Furtherrnore, one of the suicides on Vanels unearthly boat crie~ out in horror that, "There's no time here"; in this limbo-like state nither time nor space exists. See chapter VI for further discus5~on of the play.

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One flnds in the early prose wry's initial ~ropings towards )

the confrontation of reali ty and the f ing of a rnthod ,fox:, creating

or incarnating his vision. Lowry begins WI h an awareness of restlessness \ .

and dissatisfaction, _ moves to the articulatio'n---o~~_R~~lem; a,nd

finally, in Ultrarnarine which in a sense enfolds aIl 'the7x erience

of the stories, creates a carefully unified structure. .

Throughout the early work the influence of Aiken, Grieg,

Bergson, -nunne .. and Ouspensky, i~s oby~ous. Because he is unabl e as

yet to transform ~he techniques-'aQ.d ideas of others, Lowry' s stories

and Ultramarine stagger und~r the ~etght o~,drearns, serialism, \ /

precognition, and elaborate rnetaphors \ for/the expansion of consciousness. , 1

These influences',' though absorbed more tompletely in the later work,

remain constant, however, for in his article "The Garden of Etla.," , wri~ten many years after these stories, Lowry was to remark that,

according to Bergson, "the sense of time is an inhibition to prevent

everything from happening at onc. ,,2 If everytJlLng happens at once, ..

then there can be~o past and, more importahtly, no future; the

,individual becomes trap~d in a ~tatic mo~ent, a closed infernal circle. The dilemma of temporal and spatial stasis is a constant,in

il

Lowrj's work,but it is most simply stated in the early manuscrJpt

entitled "China."

"China," a' gauche story dating f'rom the early thirties, is told

?-------- ------- --by an ex-sailor reminiscin~ about his yoyage to China as fireman

aboard the Ar'ctti~ion. 'TIie 'climax of this nienta.l voyage through

time-past is the declaration that China did not and does not exist

for the narrator:

e

What 1 want to convey to you is that to me it, was not China.at . \ ' aU but ri~ht here, on this wharf. But that 1 5 not quite what 1

wanted to' say. What 1 mean is what it was n9t was China: some\'ihere far away. \lJhat i t was was here (. ~.

You see, 1 had worn myself out behind a barrier of time, 50 that when 1 did get ashore, 1 only knew it was ~.

Lowry is experimenting here with the mental voyage into ~he

past in an effort to give-. artistic form to the sensation of temporal-

spatial stasis. For the narrator, time and space have become totally ''-.. '"" \

'-.. v internalized and fixed- there is here', and then is now. Only the , .

, perc~ptual self exists ina solipsistic world without future (

or possibility. The form of the story conveys the paralysing force of

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this dilemma. The narrator., losing a11 sense of the present'. c" "

moment, discusses his strange~experience in the past t~nse, and then - .. . .. '. .Q

ends his monologue with a direct addressto the reader in the present o -

tense whic~ seems to gather up the past and to reinforce its presentness:

And here's what r want to ask you again. Haven't you felt this too, that you know yourself so weIl that the ground you ~read on is

" your ground: it is never China or Siberia or England or anywhere else . lt is always you. It is always the earth of you, the wood, the iron of you, the asphalt you step on is the asphalt of yo~ whether its on Broadway or the Chien Men.

And you carry your horizon in your poeket wherever yo~ are . . In this remarkable passage, Lowry perfectly de$cribs the typical

Lowry sensibi~ity. As yet there is'n confrontation with the destructive potential of such a radical lack of di fferentiation ,

o between internaI and external reality. Th threat is concealed'in

the story' s form which describes a closed circle within .. which time

and space are suspended.

, -

Another of the early stories, "Bulls of the Resurrection"

(c. 1933), clearly shows, the influence of Dunn; and Ouspensky.3

The significant feature of this story is the precognitive dream

shared by the two main characters, undergraduates vacationing in

Granada, Spain. Deceived by their girlfriend an~ another male ,

companion, the two students recount their dreams 'of the pr~vious night while brooding in a bar. Their dreams, which,prefigure .future

disaster for the girlfriend and her ~ew lover, curiously interloc~ to

fom one dream. Lowry has his two young men recount a dream in which

the first undergraduate observes the boyfriend arrested and then " ,

beheade~ ror shooting .,someone. The dreamer sees the murderer re-

enacting the shooting several times. The second undergraduatc has

simultaneously dreamt that he has seen the girl shot, die, then rise

to be shot over and over~again. 1

The elements of prefiguratlon and repetition suggest (with sorne

help from the very verbal and analy~ic undergraduates themselves) that - , ~-

the two men a~e "participating" in sorne kind of ri tuaI. The first

dreamer describes his vision in a striking image of'perception caught , . . ih a nightmare of mechanical repetition:

" ,. - It w.as like El Greco go~~. ma~. ~ ~ It was as though a moving

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picture had been"projected ont~ a Greo instead of onto a screen. There was this fixed, timeless, haunted background, but this was not part af what was going o~, this ws only the relief against which it: could be seen, the means by which it became visible. (8)

The mechanical movement in the drearnDis contained, frozen within the u ~

static frame of the El Greco painting.

The second dreamer, aware that he was aoout' to see "something

extraordinary which in som~_~anner held the past and the present in .. Hs meaning," articulat'es more clearly the horror of the dream: "On,Iy,

in this dream, we seemed to have no indiyiduality. We were sha~ows

whirling together in \the voig. of" a nightmare" (10) . Despi te the fact '''' \

that Lowry is here dealin~with a dream phenomenon, the qualiiies uf

the' dream have wider importance; they bear upon the type of consciousness

with which Lowry is dealing in general. Though Lowry drops the ove~t \ .

dream in his later work; the nightmari'sH' 10ss of identity and the

whir1ing visionary shapes recur (in Los Borrachones, for example). o __ " The dreamer' s wa,.y out of this infernal closed circ..le is effective for

subsequent Lowry heroes: "

Then l knew that uniess l took actioncswiftly, Terry would be compelled for ever and ever ~o go on performing the fatuous dumb ,s~w of her own death . (lI~

, This is the lesson that Dana learns and the Consul rejects. Clearly \.,.

Lowry, with the help of Ouspensky's time spirals and recurrence, was ()

beginning to realize that ~n order ta break out of a totally internalized

l~dcape or dreamworld, one must act~ move, interfere. ,The nature of

~ this activity, however, was still to be discovered.

"June 30th 1934!" an early unpublished story, mark.s a considerable

formaI advance over 'Bulls of the Resurr"ection ll and "Chin';." Here

Lowry attempts t~ capture his developing concept of the dynamic , ~

circle which underlies Ultramarine and t~~~udamental to the voyage

thel!le.

~ The sto~y>Jieal; with the'reflections ~d'visions of a British clergyma~ Bili Goodyear, cluring his retum from an unsucessful

'\ ., ~ n ..)

mission in'\t~ t:.~r Eas~. Accompanied by a fellow travller named Firmin" ," ., ,1'1,\ \ ~~

h moves f'T"om one element to another - ftom a train, to a boat, to a --__ c

train. P~ralle~ing this phy~ica1-movement,-Goo~year's-pexception--

moves, as Ouspensky sug&e~ts,Qfrom ~ne level to another until ~e'has a visio~ of the heart of ~eality~: _

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t is , They 'were ,~changing, elemnt~ , but' th ideoa struck hi'ln; no, .. '!l0re t. han, thi~, something gre~ter _ is being changed -: ~ r - - '. 1 ~ l' -" 1~ ..,,. (JI: . J ~ \

, A 'new cycte'wa~ begJnnin~,. [. .. ] the~face orthe wo:ria \\ras changing., . ~ , 1.' ," 11

, Lowryemploys two central:metaphrs t~ e~bodyhis.idea of ~ovement ~ > ... .. a a ~ ~ ~ ' ... Il,..1

an~ ch"nge - t~e voyage and al~~!mi.cal, tran,sfor~atipns'; The voyage

emboie~,the_struct~re ~f the story: Goodye~r moves' closer and Q 4." ..... "~ .. L~'~ .. ' '''... ..

cl oser ,to hi:s home' ~s \Ve)l -~ to an understanding of reality. The .. ... (} ~ 1

_a~~~~rny suggests, thtoug~'repe~ted,references to rntals and alloys, the transformation of Goodyear's psyche'until.he is able to apprehend

l 'l. a "-

the rneaning of Ij fe.' Physic'al 'movement through rne and' space ".. - __ ' .. ) li" ~ "t' pa~allels the psychi~ rnetamorphosis; the elements of human consciousness

"\ , ~ . {' . ~ ~ } . --. ----; -. may -exp:md, and change ~ke p~ysi'~al re~li ty ~ ________ , ______ _

. , Duriqg these moments.of"psy:~~!C metanorphos~s (he ev en feels'

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at one 'point' that he has 15c1ne Firmin), Goody;ear has t\Va' visions."

He' s~ems ,.to see a' yong bo~ racin~ 'th:rough the fields "~ha.rgJ1g a1on~,. 'keep~n; up wi th the tra~~." ,At one point, this boy 1S' h'1s dwn son Dick; later the boy' seems'to b- Firmin as a yobth. 'In' ,fact, as

~

Goodyear realizes, th~ boX is a vision o~ the future' raGing into the -,'"

past; he symbolizes the movement of time. Th~ second vision cornes , <

, during the thlrd'ppt of nis- journey when Goodyear is again on a . ~ train, this time in"BriVin., Peering ~rough "the steaming glass"

.... \ 't'"

of the train window, he realizes that,

Chaos, change\, aIl was changing:{'(.' the pas seng,ers wer~ changing: a sea change. , " ( ,

Goodyear lay back i~ his seat~ ~~ could feel the change within him, somehow his thoug~ts were becoming longer: an 'insidious metallurgy was in practi,ce within him a'5 his ores,' his" alloys, were' isolatedl The ~itanic thunder of the night-shift hammered on his nerves" lac'erating them as though i t would draw out from him th~ 'fine wire of his 'conscious~ss.

He knew that he"~ad beeri'"altered by'the true "pattern, the archetype of..the 2vents, on thtl surface' so tri vial, of the j ourney. And he s~sed that the ether passengers [. . J were even at a crucial point' in:their lives, turning towards another chaos, a new complex1ty of melancholy opposites.

: The dramatic force of Lowry~s stery Gomes less from Goodyear's J'" ~

,

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or contained in the boat and in the tfrai~s ",as well as Jn the' -int\nse all-envelopi~g space of his mind. This encirclirig, emphasized bi

references to the,train's wheels, and the wheels and levers of the

bqat' 50 engines, is. not static r cJo,sed, but dynamic. The ~ircumference of the circle ,,~symbo~f zed ;by the endrcling \'fallS' 'Of the tr.ain or

ship, are moving, and t,he centre ~ Goodyear' s consciousness, is , mo ~g, expanding, and changing 'as weIl.

, Goodyear ~omprises Lowry's first attempt to meet and o~ercome

t7e ~verpresent ,bou~daries and c~ossroa~s, ~n life -physical and ;

J spiritual. The activity, symbolized by the structure of the story,

signaIs release from the infernal circle throgh a repeated shaping

of new circumferences around an ever-expanding centre.~ Juxtaposed

'with a fihal image of time plunging into a future of war and Ghaos, ~

"as the express screamed on lik: a sheH through a met al world," \

- is Goodyear's realization that,

'?'It' s never too late, never too 1ate. 1'0 start aga in- Vou bor. in the earth. Silver and copper. Silver and gold. Man-makes hi~ cross .. ~ With crucible steel. Base metal; counterfeit; manganese; chromium; makes pis' iron cros~; with crucible steel.*

"'_ As qlways wth Lowry, the.~utcome is amb.igous; the transformation

may be counterfeit or the true philosopher' s,stone. The most

important point, as in October,Ferty:, is t~at change must be welcomed

and -~me must be willing to begin again. /

, In '!Sedutio .Ad absurdurri," Lowry agaiJll develops the ontrast ',- . .. - \ 0 .. "

between time and spa~e stispendea within,the closed circle of the '

mind,and thJl~ of Jile. - The shprt story was origina'11y publishe"d'

.-, .

in Experiment (Winte}, 193), under the intriguing ti tIe "Puhctum Indifferens \ " 1 ,

*The mention of the iron cross is an,al~usion to a book which.Lowry great1y admired, Herma~ Broch's The Sleepwalkers: ~ Trilogy (L~ndon, .

Q 1932).. In Broch' s book, -the military iron cross worn ,by the aristocrat-i,c,

dand_:Otmanhti~ von p~entOw 'bsymbOliZes the,ahchi~vemdqtstOft~an-~~nld ~hich, ;~_~ espl e t elr apparen su stance, are pat etlc, estruc Ive 2~ USIons. -In the preceding paragrapfi of '\J'une 30th 1934'?\' Lowry caUs the train"s passengers "somn3.Jllbu1ists" and this description, cot.tpled with the re.ference to the -iron cross, gives an ironie twist to Goodyear's vision of change.

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S9

't'"

Skibet Gaar Videre"* (Pointless Point The Ship SaHs On), and comprises

the major part of Chapte~ IV in' Ultramar:pe.4 The most significant feature of the story may be briefly stated.

, Dana, listening to the crew discuss and abuse him, and wa~qering off,

in his own memories of the1ast, decides suddenly to challenge his

chief ene~y. Time (as memory) and space (within the mind and the

ship), concentrateq into one moment's hatred become liter~lly and

metaphorically pointless. AlI Dana!s effort in holding time and

space suspndea in a long brooding stretch of anger leads to nothing; , , ,

his challenge fai 15 and the crew disperse to their chores -the ship , 0

---sails on. In Uitramarine, this persistent attempt 'to fix time and

space within a closed'circle of the mind 1s Dana's besetting sin.

The fom of the novei rea,.tes this stasis as weIl as the cons'equent

explosion of a faise arder imp?sed upon the restlss movement of , , '/---

life. /, Uitramarine, originally publIShed in ~933, was reprinted wi~h.

~ . sorne of Lowry's later revision~ in 1963. According to Margerie Lowry's , "Int'roduc'tory Note,," i t was intended to be, "in i ts rewri tten form, ,

th~ first volume in . The Voyage That Never Ends .,,5 With this purpose in view, Lowry changed the name of D~ats ship to the 0edipus

~'l.,I~::.3;~!2.uS and made other links wi th, the Vo lcano. Al th?u.gh the, .. book ) obvi~!y remains a first novel aIJd is .certairily not of th~ stature',

1 f lJ ... .,d~'i h' V 1 UI '., , Id 'f ,. t ',0 ~n er t e 0 cano, trantarl.ne 1S se om, 1. ever, g1.ven 1. S

\'~u~~~ ~or the mo~t part, critics are ~ontent to point out t~e novel 1 s ',' ,'1 6 debt to Aiken's ~ Voyage and Grieg'~,~ Ship Sails On. Lowry

himself was ashamed of the book. . , , ~ In spite of.we~nesse~, the structure'of the b~ok illustrates

. the tremendous cohtrol'which Lowry was developing over'his materials

\ * "S1dbet Gaar Videre" is the Norwegian ti fle of Nordahl Grieg 1 s novel. Grieg's book, although written in a simple style with a strong moral, reveals a profotmd philsophical p.essimism in its title and in . ,1

, scattered remarks such as': "Li fe had p layed one of i ts scenes over ~ again, a n'ew spiral had wound i ts way upward, and now he fot.md himself looking down into it;:(167). Lowry's attraction to Grieg's n9vel was more tha~ a simple affinity for the nJneteen year old hero's initiation into the horrors of'life on a first sea voyage. Underlying the story, are hints that 1;ime repeats itself inexorably, th~t"life 1.5 a maelstrom of meaningless chnge, and that~reincarnation is likely (see pages 78 and 87). _'" ' . '

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60

As' wi th the Volcano and.,Qark ~ the Grave, in Ul trarnarin:; Lowry

expands a short period of time, approximately forty-eight hours, into

the months and years enfolded in Dana's consciousness. Nineteen

years~re contained within the small circle of two days passd

in one place.

The structure of UitramaFlne is circular. Beginning in Danals

mind, the narrative circles repeatedly from extern~l action ando dialogue back into Dana~ ~/consciousness until the final 1 ine of, the

book places the reader within the herols mind once more. The book

is crowded with images of circles and encircling -the engines, wHeeling

birds, eyes, Dana's Iost compasss, -even the ship, the harbour of

Tsjang-Tsjang, and e sea, function as'further Iarers of encircling

realit)'. ,

Within the rst four chapters, Lowry counterpoints two geogr~phical

and spiritua~ oints alo~g the ,circurnference of the superimposed

cir,cles of ,- he voyage and Dana 1 s G.onsciousness. The first geographical

and s 'ritual point is the ship's departure for the East which Dana

--rmembers as the book opens. It is essentiaJ. to em~hasi,ze that

Ultramarine begins as the Oedipus Tyrannus is nearing the port of

Tsjang-Tsjang, the furthest point of her voyage. In Dana's mind, '"

'hJwev~, the ship is stil! preparing to leave Liverpool. During the co'urs~ of the first four ~haptez:s, Dana __ moves deeper into ,his past

before gradually circling'his way back again, in Chapter IV, to the

time of his departure f!om home, His memory transcribes an enormous

circle untii it catches itself up at the crucial moment of severance,

the sailing ,of his ship (pages 140-142)" This point in time haunt5 (

- him becatise it- symbolizes severance from his youth and initiation ,J / ...

into life. Furtherrnore, it is just this initiation or birth, this

b~eaking out of the womb-like circle of his past, from which he

shrinks in dread.

! -~ The\'seco1)~'geographical and spi-ritual point of ,Danals victous ~ircle is the furthest poipt of the voyag~, the harbour of Tsjtng-

Tsjang and the a?yss ?f the prese~t self. " While the ship is idle at

dock, Dana, his mi~d and soul in an~alogous static state, plumbs,

the very depths of his private hello This hell, ,Projected upoo --- . 'external reality by his distorted vision, results from his constant

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61

re-living of the pa$t in the ~r~sent and his persistent refusaI to

welcome life. Transf!xed, like ~ ''tinfoil Jesus," between these two poi~ts, Dana must first learn to recognize the self-inflicted hell

for what it is and then to move out of his closed circle of time

and space. /

By the end of Chapter 1 wi th the boat docked and night falling,

Dana, who has refused to enter life by going ashore, retreats to his

bunk and his memories of the pasto The visions which he has as he

falls asleep highlight his spiritual crisis. Dana is 50 entirely ,

enclosed in self that he cannot consciously articulate his problem

until the 'end of the book. !Ne reader~ drawn into the maelstrom ,

of Danals mind, experiences the claustrophobic horror of a consciousn~ss \

closed in upon itself. Believing that the ship "had a manifold

security: she was his harbour; heowould lie in the arms of the

ship"(43), Dana glides into a sleep immediately filled with wheeling ..

,~creaming horror: ..... ~J . 1 Above, the moon soared~and galloped through a dark, tempestuous skYe AlI at once, every lam in the street exploded, their globes flew " out, darted into the sk and the street bec?me alive with eyes; eyes greatly dilated, drippin d scurf, or glued with viscid gum: eyes which held eternity in t f edness of their stare: eyes which wavered, and spread, and, lminishing rapidly, were catapulted east and west; eyes that were the gutted windo~ of'a cathedrl,

'blackened, emptiness of the brain, through which bats and ravens whe~led enormouslY[ :J. (44)

Significarltly, the vision is ~ne of movement and the breaking

, bf enclosing circles: lamps, explode, their "globes" flying into the -. sky, eyes waver, n'd 'Jdim:..nishing" are "catapul td east and west";

l

even the enclosing glass of windows is shattered allowing bats and

ravens tcf "wheel'normously" through their empty frames. This is , a~ision of the chaotic flux which Dana must acceptj howver, at this

point in his voyage he 'is only capable of seeing chaos as nightmarish

horror. The closest he cornes' here'to confrontlng his true position occurs in 'the dream which concludes the Chapter- without

his compasses' (to 9raw continul circles or to locate his own centre)

he is "Lost. Lost. Lost." - ~ ,In Chapter II, the ship stati in the harbour parallels Danals

increasing wi thdrawal 'into an abyss of self. ' Dana, escapes the reality

d

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1 62 i 1

of present time ~d space by dredging up time past and pre-voyage

places until the; form a hard shel1 of encrUsted memory ar.ound his

timoro~s psyche. ~he climax of his descent into self cornes when, with perception inverted and distorted, he envisions the Oxenstjerna,

a symbol of moveme~t,life, and a positive growing past, the ox-star

"t!la:t ~~hines above :the lives of men," grounded and oozlng death: ~----------- It i5 the oxens~jer~a they are 'talking about 1 the Oxenstjerna

that h,a5 gorie aground. It is the Oxen5tjerna which now -turns over \ and sinks into thelsaqd, white the oil spreads a mucous' fil~ over the Mersey; and no,t; the white sea gulls .. knoW11, by name to the v

~ dockers 1 are dying by the score - (74) 1

, Luwry, with the virtuqslty th~~haracterizes ,Under the Volcano~ forges here a most striking image 0 tasis and enveloping death

which functions like a magnet within the heart of the book. In "

one brief passage he enfolds the cluster. of motifs surrounding the

;'~oxenstjerna with the various bird motifs in the novel, and even the haunting motif o'f eyes; tla mucous filln" (like aU the eye imagery,

drawn frbm- J;,'bwr~' s persona! sufferings) recalls the vision ef eyes 1 fil

in Chapter l, ard fuses with the ge~eral the me of Dana's spiritual,

blindness. Lowry' s, technique, in a miniature example such as this q

image of the GJenstJerna, as weil as i~ larger structural'units, is one of enfolding and encircling. The image is superficially quite ~ simple, but it vibrates with a plenitude of ceri'tripetal meaning.

In addition to embodying severai mo~ifs, motifs which can only be

fully understoo~ when viewed within the totality of the book, the

Oxenstjerna passage symbolizes Dana's consciousness: Like the ship

,he has gone aground and "now tums over and sinks into the snd. fi

L The lowest ~int of Dana' s descent.' occurs in ~apter III -as, !le stumbles about Tsjang-Tsjang in a drunken nightmare. This lowest

!

point, however', fully in keeping wi th Lo~ry' s concept of the fusion

of opposites, marks the beginning of his ascent; Dana grapples with "

"the recognition .and articulation of his positi~n. His self-analysis

is still typically exaggerated and maudlin but he at least ~dmits to 'Q _ 0

these aspects of his nature. Enclosed within the rhetoric of his self-

portrait is the further realization that he al one creates his heaven

or hell: ,

Tinfoil Jesus, crucified ~omunculus (who is a}so the cross), spitted

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"'-

on the hook of an imaginary Galilee! Who is the crown of thorns dripping red blossoms and the red-blue nails, the flails and the bloody wounds. The tears, but aiso the lips cupped to embrace them as they fall; the whips, bu~ also the flesh crawling.to them. The net and the silver writhing in the mesh,and aIl the fish that swim in the sea. - The centre of the Charing Cross, ABCD, the Cambridge Circle, the Cambridge Circus, is Hilliot - but every night, unse~, he climbs down and returns to his hotel - while the two great shafts, the propeller shafts, -the shafts of wit, laced wfth blood, AB,CD are diameters. /

Now wfth hi el as centre and half CD as radius, describe a .vicious circle! (98 - 99)

~

Amidst a geometrici~n's paradise of circles, Dana ses himself as

a cheap poseur, a Christ who climbs down from his self-inflict~d

cross to seek the shelter of his bed in a hotel room. The image of

Dana as tpe-centre of a circle with the four circumference points \

making a cross, ABCD" crystil1lizes his physical and spiritual \\

dile~ma; the points'are fixed, the radius is given, the circle is

closed, vicious.

Questioning his entire purpose for this voyage, Dana explains his

failure in the very terms which will help him break out of his

calcified circle of time and space. Challenging Janet's belief in

him he cries: ~

[CJoUld you still belleve in me, still believe in the notion that my voyage is something Columbian and magnificent? Still believe in my taking a self-inflicted penance; in this business 'of placing myself within impenetrable and terrible boundaries in order that a slow . processof justification te) xourself may go on. (sic] (99) , ,0

Naming the names and sayirlg the words is always magic with Lowry.

Dana will soon break out of the seemingly "impenetrable'and terrible

'boundaries" of his self-created hello As centre to -his circle he .

will mave and in moving transcribe an ever new cir~umference.

By Chapter IV, Dana's agonited attempts to re-inhabit the past /"

hav brought him circling back to the P9int at w~ich the bOOK opened;

the departure from England of the Oedipus Tyrannus. In the retrospect

of his retum to Liverpool after the farewell with Janet, the Mersey

strikes him as "like a vast camera film slowly and inexorably winding.

Saon he will be entangled in her celluloid meshes, and wound ut ~o the ,

open sea. "(142). In a sense, Dana has encirc1ed in memory his own

position (mqch a~ he does l~ter with Andy); he has comefull ircle.

Now is the tirne to strike out anew. The challe~ge to Andy represents \'

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~ hs first decisive action of the voyage. He does not grasp the profound

truth, however, that this intense moment which gathers up aIl his

. ,

anger and frustration is, in fact, a '~punctum indifferens. ", Life

cannot be seized and frozen in this way for it ~lows on, forever 1"

eluding the grasp. As the card players remark upon returning to

ther game after Dna's interruption, "- pais -'" "- pass _II fI_ pass -"(153)

The ship sails on or, at least in Chapter V, it prepar~s to leave

port. Prior to the ship's departure, the culminating crisis of

the book occurs. Norman's pet pigeon (with consequences that reca11

th~ Ancient Hariner' s a1batross) escapes from its cage and drowns.

Dana and the crew stand by helplessly watching it die while a nearby

motor boat, "its occupant[ ::J spinning the easy: wheel while it 1 v

circ1ed aroun9 g~,i1y[ . ), turned on itself and r?lred in its own

swell" (162).~ The last moments of the ship' s stasis at the dock parallel Da~a's inability to save the bird. Suddenly, amidst rolling

winches and coj linOg l'opes, "the windlass clanking" and racing around I!'

1~, gladly" and the t~ger "moulding its body t? the ~hape of i ts cage',"

Dana remembers Norman's grief ?t the 10S5 of his pet and ses the ", ,

truth: ~'}.~

No, ~uch things couldn't ~appen real1y. But Norman's words made a sort of incantation in his brain. "Time! Of course there would have been time: Time wouldn't have matter~~ if you'd bee~ a man.", (166)

This truth is without value, however, un1ess one knO\'ls how to

use it, and Dana is still uncertain. With the renewed peace of the

vessel under sail, he contemplates the roaring fres in the "pulsating"

and throbbing~.' engine room: ,f . '\

Why was it his brain could not accept the dissonance as simply as a hannony, could not make order emerge from his chaos?C:. J Chaos and disunion, then, he told himself, not law and order, were the princip les of life which sustained aIl things,.in the mind of man as weIl as on the ship. (169)

Being unable to accept chaos as gooa is Dana'; greaf sin. In his

effoFts to order and contain reality, he has only succeeded in stif1ing ~ v

himself, and life, withJn a tightly sealed tomb of time and space.

Now that he has admitted the priority of chaos, he is ready to

mOYe on to a reconciliation with Andy who symbolizes the forces of life

into which Dana must be initiated. Wi th the meaning of the maelstrom

and "a reason for his voyage" clearly perceived, Dana looks down in'to b

,

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the engin,e room once more. There he. sees Niko1ai, the fireman,.

serving the very source of energy and chaos: ,

65

The iron tools blistered his hands, his chest heaved 1ike a spent swirnrner's,his eyes ting1ed in parched sockets, but still he worked on, he, wou1d never stop - this was what it was to exist - (171)

'{ ., ,. -v Never to stop in the journey of life, this is Dana' s discovery. Life

is flux, chaos, energy, while d~ath, 1ike a ship gone aground, like

a fixed, transcribed circ le ABCD, is stasis. Paradoxically, 1ife

exist5 in the fiery ,abyss of the ship and Dana cherishes his discovery f'

while "somewhere," as if warning that this point of l'est i5 a

''pmctum indifferens," "a lantern clanged with eternal, pitiless

movement" (172).

Significantly, Ultrarnarine does not end 0n this pinnac1e of

insight. Although the narrative rhythm reahes completion by the

end of Chapter V, the novel continues, mirroring in its structure

what Dana ha~ still to 1earn. In this sense, Ultramarine was an idea1 prologue for LOlvry' 5 intenoed voyage that ncver ends. Dana

Hi1liot, prefiguring the restless voyaging of subsequent Lowry

heroes, realizes that he ha~ "surrounded Andy' s position" and must

move ,on; life is a continuaI movement of centre and circumference,

a never-ending voyage undertaken for the sake of the voyage itself: ,

(There is[ .. J a storm flood within, as rny heart beats with the beating of tne engine, as~I go out with the ship towards the eternal surnmers. A storm is thundering out there, there is the glow of trdpical fire! Bad, or good, as it happens t~ be, that is what

, i t is to exist! ~ . It is as though l haye been sHent and fuddletl with slep aU my life. [ J . I know now that at 1east it is better to gq always towards the summer [. .. ]. Then at last again to be outward bound, always outward, a1ways on\'iard, to be fighting lways for the drearnt -of -harbour ( .. :J -) . (201) 1

Th en , lest this solution of lif's mystery appear too siIl}p'i-e,'

Lowry charts the next stage in Dana's initiation. A fireman is ill " and nana is chosen to replace him; he must descend into the abyss of

life which he earlier contemplated with acute insight. During his

last moments on deck, a strange ship drifts through the night

mi st "morseing" her name: Oxenstjerna. Like a voiee from his past

this ship c.,alls to him, reminding him that on the point of creating a

new circ1e into the future he must' take the past with him--as comfort

and as threat. If he again makes the profound rnistake of withdrawing

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into a hard shell of time and space, he will destroy his world.

Fo~ life is perpetuaI activity f'alwa~s outward, always onward."

66

The next stage' in Lowry' s The Voyage That Never Ends is prefigured \

in Dana's des cent intor

"the little hell,If of the ship's furnaces.

In Lunar Caus tic , begun in 1935 J the protagonist "gliding over the , . cobbles lightly as a ship leaving harbour" searches frantically for

7 . "any harbour at aIl." The Lowryean protagonist of Ul tramarine finds,

in Lunar Caustic, that he is "outward bound" for hell. The essential

aspec;t of Lowry's Voyage ~ Never ~ is to create a movement of

withdrawal fro~ reality and retum. In this sense, then, Lunar

Caustic embodies'~ withdrawal after the temporary respite and return

established at th end of Ultramarine.

Lowry was proud of.Lunar Caustic referring to it in 1952 as a ''masterwork'' (Selected, letters, 292). The published novella

c \. -

represents the worl( 'o:f"Lowry edit ors Earle Birney and Margerie Lowry J

however, who completed Lowry's melding of two rather different

versions of the,story.8 In 1936, Lowry comp1eted a first version of

the story based upon his oWn brief visit, in 1934, to Bellevue Mental Hospital; the story, never published,

~ ,

New York's

was called

The Last Address. In 1940 Lowry

Swinging the Maelstrom.

vry important respect:

The two

wrote a second version entitled 1 versions of the story differ in onc;

1 ( The Last Address ends. darkly with the ---"-----

p:uotagonist withdrawn from life as in the published Lunar Caustic:

Swinging the ~1aE\lstrom, however, issues ,in greater bope with the

protagonist breaking ,out of the cirele of self in order to establish a

limited contact with others. As the second title suggests l the

; experience is not a descent into th~l!1st~om Cafter Poe) but swinging -or.a weathering of the storm,' Whether Lowry intended te) .Jo

give Lunar Caustic a slightly ~ore positive,ending or not 1s unclear;

certainly. it has a n~gative conclusion in its published form. The protagonist of Lunar Caustic does not escape his private hell which

tums encircling layers, of reality into- a Dantean inferno. ,"

Lunar Caustic traces the inner tQrment of its hero, William

Plantagenet, alcoholi~ and ex-jazz musician, from his druQken . ' admission into a mentl hospital to his release shortly afterwQrds as

much of an alcoholic failur~ as before. The topography, drawn largely

. ,

"

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67

from Melville and Poe, is a 'landscape of the mind with the hospital, .

a symbol of containment and stasis, juxtaposed with the busy river

seen from the barred hospital windows. The river, flowing symbol

of movem~nt and life, remains inJccessible to Plan~agenet as weIl ai to the boy Garry and the old man Kalowsky whom Plantagehet befriendj

in the ~ITospital. Unable to help Garry or Kalowsky, fnapaile finally of escaping from the circle of self, Plantagenet.Jeaves the hospital , o~ly to descend deepr into internaI stasis. ~

The horror of Lunar Caus tic ?prin~s from its claustrophobie /

atrnosphere of stasis and enclosre. The hospital syrnbolizes the

simultaneity of time and space - time does .not exist, and "there are

no clear boundaries (apart from the oppressive bars and walls of the

hospital itself) to reality in this world of the ihsane. The hospital,

not only a symbol' of physical enclosure', represents the mind of the

hero as loJell:

Lookfng do"~ at' [the river) a delic~ous sense of freed0m possessed him, a sense of being already outside, free to run with the wind if he wished, free to run as far away from the hospita'l as he liked. Yet the bars were still here, and they resernbled the bars of his mind C: J. He had not esca~ed them yet, nor would he escape them merely by leaving. (65) ~

The priso